


black space

by fallfromstars



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-28
Updated: 2014-12-28
Packaged: 2018-03-03 22:35:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2890469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallfromstars/pseuds/fallfromstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.” --Cathrynne M. Valente, Deathless [James Buchanan Barnes, featuring Natasha Romanova and Steve Rogers]</p>
<p>In which a Soldier with no name fights a war without end and is visited by the figures he is destined to defend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. PROLOGUE | 1940s

**Author's Note:**

> “I will not let her speak because I love her, and when you love someone, you do not make them tell war stories. A war story is a black space. On the one side is before and on the other side is after, and what is inside belongs only to the dead.” [James Buchanan Barnes, featuring Natasha Romanova and Steve Rogers]
> 
> In which a Soldier with no name fights a war without end and is visited by the figures he is destined to defend.
> 
> \--
> 
> This is basically a story that started with the question, "What if Bucky Barnes was also visited by Russian folklore figures as prominently seen in Deathless?" because I'm horrible, that's why. This is less a story about missions and actions and training and things people have written before (and better than I would), but more along the experimentation and folklore and survival of everyone working to the same end.
> 
> Feedback is always appreciated! Each part will deal with one decade from the 1940s to the 2010s, with plenty of liberties in between. Thank you in advance; enjoy!

**prologue | 1940s**   
  
**(6.26.1945)**   
  
_Mrs. Rebecca Barnes Proctor_   
_190 Brightwood Ave_   
_Washington D.C._   
  
_I am deeply distressed to inform you corrected report just received state your brother Sgt. James Buchanan Barnes who was previously reported missing in action was killed in action on sixteen January 1945 en route to Italy. The secretary of war asks that I express his deep sympathy in the loss of your brother and his regret that unavoidable circumstances made necessary the unusual lapse of time in reporting your brothers death to you confirming letter follows._   
  
_Colonel Chester Philips_   
  
  


* * *

 

**(1.16.1945)**  
  
You may very well presume. Dr. Zola. A pleasure, I’m sure. We have brought you in for a very special purpose, Doctor.   
  
We have brought you to solve an unsolvable question.  
  
Walk with me. It will not be long.  
  
The question is:  _How does one make a prisoner of war useful?_  
  
By themselves they are not very much. A hateful twisted mouth, muscles turned against their hated enemy. An immovable object. Heavy. Unwieldy. Another mouth to feed, and the winter will not leave us for some time.   
  
A liability, unless one fixes that.  
  
What to do with such a man? The possibilities are endless, but some possibilities are more useful than others.   
  
First scenario.   
  
One can strip the man of his bravery and his training, his arrogance and his resistance, and torture him until he coughs up information. Every man is different, but most will surrender the truth up in tribute after you yank a tooth from their skull or perhaps send a knife under their fingernail and lift it _up_ and let their blood hiss in the air. But there is the _mess_ to consider, not to mention that prisoners of war who break never become useful. They snivel in corners and shriek at lights. Tortured prisoners become rats, and we have enough of those already.  
  
Second scenario.  
  
One can strip the man of his cotton and his knives, his sharp edges and his warmth, and send him barreling headfirst into the recesses of Siberia. One may let him seek out his death among the stumbling blindness of the snow. Men walk long ways in the winter to find the warmth that is and is not there, shivering and crying until the end for bread and vodka until they walk no more, petrified and frosted over beneath the Northern lights. But that fate is reserved for looters and traitors and deserters, men who were born in the right country and chose to spit at it.   
  
You can see the problems.  
  
Third...ah.  
  
This man? He was, like all the men in these cells, born on the wrong side. We can none of us choose where we are born.  
  
We can all of us choose where we _live_ , Doctor.  
  
As I was saying.  
  
Third scenario.  
  
One can strip the man of his memory and his heart, his comfort and his solace, and twist the sharp edges of him back onto the place he calls home. But how would one take this from another? The memory and the heart are abstract concepts, not easily quantified and qualified. How does one turn to a man, say, “Turn your back on everything and everyone you have ever loved,” and make him listen, and know he did so?   
  
Grant him a _tabula rasa_.   
  
Does one know it will take?  
  
It is especially troublesome when the subject is on the wrong side and the malleability of his brain is not yet proven, not yet shared in files ripped from the other side. This man here, in the cell? He was an American once. A sergeant. There was a point in his life when that song about the stars and spangles and banners might have stirred his heart. Not very long ago, if you must know.  
  
It glints so fiercely in the light, doesn’t it? But he’d feel it if you touch it, and his stability has been spiking and falling. Best to let it lie.    
  
It is not an easy thing, you realize, upturning all that love for native soil. It is the baseline, the groundwork for what comes next. That sort of idea seeps into the marrow, into the blood. It is why this country gives its boy children soldiers to play with and project upon and tells them to chase after beautiful girls named Marya. It is also the reason girls who grew up being Marya to their neighbor’s Ivan marry those Ivans and have little daughters who they dotingly call Marya. They must know where they belong. If you wish to remove this from a man, you must rip it out, and leave that gaping hole open an awful long time before you suggest anything else.   
  
Ah. He _stirs_.  
  
Come closer.   
  
I will tell you everything you need to know.


	2. CHAPTER ONE | 1950s

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 1950s.

**chapter one | 1950s**  
  
 **(12.4.1952)**  
  
They thaw the man who used to be a man named James Buchanan Barnes for the first time in the dying gasp of autumn, in 1952. He does not remember that name. To the men around him, scientists all, he is simply the Soldier.  
  
They speak to him in slow words. The world is fuzzy and terror-filled around him. At one point he snaps, and lashes out at them. The world won’t stop spinning, and he must have someone stop it. He hears the rapid, urgent beep of his pulse, feels it throb against his neck. He reaches for the needles in his left arm, but he shrinks back at the sight of metal instead of flesh, a red star emblazoned on him the color of Firebird feathers.  
  
He screams, rages, and the scientists start to panic. Orders overlap each other, and because everyone belongs to everyone else, and the men on the team are inherently equal in the absence of their supervisor, it is a mess until one of them, agitated, yells at the others to calm down and sticks a needle into the neck of the man who used to be James Buchanan Barnes.   
  
In the daze of the tranquilizer he can feel the touch of someone, soft, not restraining, and all he can see is a woman with a white face and a long waterfall of dark hair, wings rounding out her shoulders, cold and beautiful, and she eases the struggle into sleep.

* * *

**(12.4.1956)**

  
In the fallout of the correct ideology rooting in the faraway forest mountains of Hungary, some smart-mouthed teenagers have decided to seize opportunities that do not exist, grasp at straws and come out with power, ripping sickles and hammers from their rightful place in the schools. There are whispers of defection, of a return to capitalism, even to imperialism.  
  
“It does not matter how many times you tell them to; children will not listen,” says the doctor, with round glasses and a smile that knew once to be kindly.   
  
The doctor is talking to the Soldier who used to be James Buchanan Barnes, and to a woman who used to only want to be a ballerina for the Bolshoi and for the glory of Russia. She is more than that now, with poison at her fingers and leather on her hips, but she still holds her feet in first position, as if she is waiting for the Soldier to lift her into the air.   
  
The particulars of the mission wash over and under the Soldier like a lazy current. His eyes are on his companion, with her waterfall of dark hair and skin the color of snow. Her eyelashes are ashen and long, her lips pink and parallel. She was the last one to touch him before he was gone again, he feels it now, and he must know more of her, of the dream he chased across the ice.  
  
When the Soldier asks her name, she smiles in a way he cannot place, softly, shyly, and says that her name is not important.   
  
“I am the Black Widow,” she says, but the Soldier asks her for the name she was born with, and after a long pause and bitten lip, she supplies it: Natalia Konstantinova.  
  
The Soldier and the Black Widow agree when their commander tells them they will be dropped in Petrograd and will remind the people of Russia that glory of the country came first, comes first, will always come first.   
  
In the blank space between the order and the drop, Natalia Konstantinova waltzes over to her Soldier, her ankles at impossible angles and her steps making no noise.  
  
Her hair is neatly curled and falls over her visible collarbones, her lips twisted in curiosity and her eyes ringed with white. She is the cold of the Aurora borealis, but soft as new-fallen snow; he could fall inside the cold of her. Her fingers trace the outline of his arm, the star emblazoned upon it, and though he tries to flinch from her touch, she finds his eyes with hers and smiles quietly at him.  
  
“I have a gift for you,” says Natalia Konstantinova, her voice a lullaby in the darkness of night, “one I hope you will never need.”  
  
From the recesses of her gown, which flows behind her and catches the light, she produces a small capsule. The Soldier reaches to inspect it, but Natalia Konstantinova holds up a white hand.  
  
“Do not open it until you need it,” the Black Widow says, “and you will know when.”  
  
There is a catch, and she shows him, her thin fingers undoing the lock to reveal a capsule no longer than her tongue. A faint whiff of poison fills the air, and she does not need to say any more.  
  


* * *

 **(12.4.1957)**  
  
The missions bleed into each other after a time, and they are all the same: briefing on the target, a drop with Natalia Konstantinova beside him. In times of power, of victory, the two of them fall from each other, able to conquer and divide on their own. When the odds are against them, she shrinks behind the shadow of his arms, and prepares the capsules for the both of them.  
  
They never need them, but she prepares them anyway, and when he asks her why, she says it is because it is always better to die with your secrets locked in your jaw than to defect, than to commit the ultimate cowardice.  
  
Natalia Kostantinova says this without blinking and that is how he knows it is true, and he holds the thought against him like a pearl under his tongue as he is put on ice, again, always the ice after, always, always.  
  
In sleep he pursues her, lifts her, keeps her close. When he wakes, he asks for her first, and the shudders stop only when she is beside him.  
  


* * *

**(1.4.1958)**

He finds that he does not remember many things. When he asks the attendants do not know what to say: they do not only lack the English language, but they stand stiff at the thought of it.  
  
 _Russian_ , a voice in his head reminds him, a voice that sounds like Natalia Konstantinova’s. _Russian only. They won’t understand you otherwise._  
  
The Soldier tries again. He does not understand. _What is happening?_  
  
 _It needn’t worry you, sir_ , says the same kind attendant, a needle as long as a witch’s nail shining thinly in his hand. _Nothing out of the ordinary._   
  
When the needles retreat and the blurring ends, the Soldier is given permission to sleep outside of his icy chamber. Cryogenic sleep is forced upon him, icicles nipping at the red flesh of his nose and his metal fingers frosted with cold. His chest does not remember the subtle rise and fall of breathing. It is a hard go for him, as many things are now.  
  
He first sees her in the middle of the night. He stands on end immediately once he notices the presence, his spine inching itself even more ramrod straight once he catches the glint of the Soviet army on her. She is a she, he can tell. She smells too dissimilar to the scientists in his service, or whose service he is in, or whatever the truth happens to be.  
  
“Who are you?” he asks, in English first. The woman looks puzzled, so he repeats his question again in Russian. The Cyrillic letters sound stale and foreign in his mouth, even after all this time, though he can’t figure out why.    
  
“My name is Marya Morevna,” says the woman in response, and this makes sense to the Soldier. She does not offer him her rank despite her dress, so instead he fixes her in his gaze as he would any woman. Marya Morevna is stunningly beautiful, which is trouble enough on its own, but her eyes are sharp and her mouth does not lie.   
  
Her hair is as dark as the night above Siberia. Her skin is as white as the unbroken first snow of winter. Her dark eyes glint fiercely, and her bee-stung lips shimmer temptingly. She does not turn in her feet the way a soldier does, parallel lines never intersecting, but places them in the first position, a resting habit of...   
  
He blinks again and Marya Morevna has Natalia Kostantinova’s face, but she looks at him as if he is a stranger. His head spins, dancing upon the heads of the pins in her hair.  
  
He can feel his brokenness beside him, nothing but cold metal and the red star he has come to search for in the sky. But she does not shy away from him.  
  
“Have you been fighting long?” asks Marya Morevna. He is envious of how quickly words come to her, how the words she is saying lilt in and out of his ear.  
  
“A long time,” he admits. It feels like years. It can’t have been more than days. Can it? The ice makes everything numbed, cut off, and nobody has ever told him the date when he has asked.  
  
“Some days it feels the war will never be over,” says Marya Morevna, sitting beside the Soldier.   
  
Yes, the Soldier thinks. This makes sense. He is only woken the war is going badly.  
  
On Natalia--no, Marya’s--hand is a beautiful ring, the stone as clear as new ice, the gold pale and shimmering, out of place amongst all her military dress. She catches the Soldier looking at it.  
  
“A little gauche, isn’t it?” she says with a shrug. “My husband insisted, so the men wouldn’t get any ideas. But I can’t say I dislike it.”  
  
“Your--” He remembers now.   
  
Marya Morevna is the lawful wife of Koschei the Deathless, and by that alone, more dangerous than any other woman in all Russia. He notices the details on her battle finery now. She is not only married to the Tsar of Life but also a Major-General in Koschei’s army, high above a Soldier who fights a different war altogether.  
  
He salutes, as is his duty.  
  
She looks down, as is her role.  
  
“I wish you wouldn’t,” she says quietly in the voice of Natalia Kostantinova. When he does nothing she snaps at him.   
  
“At ease, _soldat_ ,” she commands in the voice of Marya Morevna, and then he listens.  
  
“Major-General,” the Soldier says slowly, “what is the event of your visit?”  
  
“I am to tell all the men not in the Army,” says Major-General Marya Morevna, “that a true miracle has come.” She rises, the shine of her boots blinding him. “Come, _soldat_.”  
  
She takes his metal fingers in hers when he makes no movement. Her face shimmers, lands somewhere between Natalia Konstantinova and Major-General Marya Morevna. His stomach has nothing to offer his throat but he lurches anyway, pulled along by the shine of her hair and the shade of her skin.  
  
She brings him to a sphere the color of steel, the color of progress, with four radio antennas rounding it like a sharpened halo. Major-General Marya Morevna, with Natalia Konstantinova’s face, walks impossibly up the smooth surface, her coat billowing behind her, then motions for the Soldier to follow.   
  
Once the Soldier has a slippery footing on the sphere, Natalia-Marya-Natalia braces herself against the Soldier’s arm, and her black hair blinds him as the sphere goes up quickly, impossibly, off the ground. Fire burns beneath their feet, but they are still untouchable and cold, even as the air grows thin and the clouds grow heavy all at once.  
  
When Marya’s hair settles back beneath the furs of her coat, the two of them are surrounded at all angles by stars and spheres, of dreams only spoken of before. When the Earth turns beneath them the shadow of the United States is seen, but the Americans’ arrogance and pride do not help them. It is a son and daughter of the Soviet Union who see space first, not any hedonist, fragile Americans.  
  
There is a long silence as the Earth lumbers beneath them and the thrice-by-ninth kingdom spins back into view. In space, there is no sound, so the Soldier supposes this is appropriate. Major-General Morevna’s mouth twists.   
  
The Soldier does not know what to do in response, so he does nothing.  
  
“Glory to Mother Russia,” says Major-General Marya Morevna in response, for the both of them, so she will not have to report him. When she stands she shifts to third position, her feet a tangle and her arms outstretched like raven wings. The Soldier, knowing that he is outranked, stands when she does, then kneels before her. She runs fingers against his cheek, more of a mere mortal woman than a terrible, cold Tsaritsa.   
  
Terrible, and cold.  
  
And beautiful.  
  
“I have more soldiers to tell,” she says apologetically, and the Soldier feels something inside him stir.   
  
_Don’t go. How will I know if I stop breathing? Only the ice stops it now. I need someone here. Someone. Anyone. Major-General, please._  
  
The words die in his mouth.   
  
“But I hope you will not despair, comrade. You did well today, doing the work of twenty men all on your own. The Union needs more men like you. You are the reason we all of us can sleep at night.”  
  
The Soldier mumbles his awkward thanks.  
  
“ _Spokojnoj nochi, soldat_ ,” she says, but she sounds far away, as if there is a layer of ice and a cold, dark ocean between them already. Before he can ask her--is that my name? is that what I am called?--she is gone, and his footing is too, and he is headed back to the depths of Siberia at hundreds of thousands of kilometers an hour.  
  
Miracle of miracles that he does not burn, that he wakes in his cell with Natalia Kostantinova’s name on his lips, and when they put him on ice again, she is there, her eyes glinting with tears, her lips split by a burn, and he knows, he _knows_ she was truly there with him the night before.

* * *

  
 **(12.1.1959)**  
  
Report from field STOP Black Widow Natalia Kostantinova killed in action STOP failed attempt to assassinate target STOP send next attendants of program immediately STOP repeat Natalia K dead send next Widow END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Marya Morevna/Natalia Kostantinova tells Bucky good night, soldier.


End file.
